New to the community but have been dabbling a little in Home Assistant on Raspberry Pis for a while now.
Finally received my Home Assistant Yellow with CM4 pre-installed and power adaptor from Crowd Supply after 15 months of waiting… but I can’t get it to work.
I’ve got it plugged into my router where my old RP4 was, powered on and left it for about 4 hours but it won’t show up on http://homeassistant.local:8123 or when replacing homeassistant.local with my the IP address my router has assigned to it.
The LEDs are on as follows:
Red: Constant on
Yellow: Beating twice in short succession, like a heart beat every couple of seconds
Green: Flashing once every second
I’ve not had much luck finding others on the forums with the same problem who have this form of the Yellow; i.e. the one that’s supposed to be working out of the box. However, for those that have had similar problems with self installs I’m seeing things that suggest a bad installation or a faulty CM4 module.
Thanks for the link. I’ve had a read through this but the LED flashes I’m getting don’t match the documentation - the lights don’t match anything on the RPi Warning Flash Codes and the yellow flashing LED according to the Home Assistant link say the OS is running, but it’s not.
I’ll try plugging the Yellow into my computer via USB and see if I can get the debug log but I’m a little stuck at the first step and don’t really understand what it’s asking me to do with the homebrew.
Thanks, just tried this - the CM4 appears to be seated properly. It’s flush with the main board and doesn’t seem to wiggle or move at all. I can’t find a way to remove the heatsink to check properly though.
I have to press enter a good 20+ times through pages of gibberish before I get prompted for login credentials, but as I type “root” it generates more gibberish and doesn’t seem to go anywhere whether I hit enter or not.
Welcome to Home Assistant
homeassistant login: rn�����11�H!)+�RX!)+#{)/
+Z!)H��#))##)�+
+c+)!#�k+!+!c+��a)a�+)!)z!i
With this - the instructions say to use a USB-C cable. I don’t have a USB-C port on my computer so I’m using a USB-C to USB-A cable. Could this be an issue?
After trying a few different cables and still getting lots of gibberish, I eventually got somewhere that suggests HA is alive somewhere, but couldn’t get anything for debugging:
�a����)N�Nɛ��’r))�+#k���)��k��ɷ�N�nJ���)�/�)�z�N��l�(!)+�RX!)+iΥ����h�꽷n����=���J���)�/�)�z�N���a����)N�Nɛ���)Ȥ��h�꽷n����=���J���)�/!#�Z§)c#Ia���)N�Nɛ���)Ȥ��)�!��)��k��ɷ�N�nJ���+#+!vR� !a!cb����)N�Nɛ���)Ȥ��h�꽷n����=���J���+#+�i�)�z�N����1!����$�)��%��g�-!!{Υ�! �Ĉ������zk��’J�Z�Z�뉄B��K^yy{�JK�?hZ�c[�B_B���;x��b�j�^�cĄkJJK8{C)�b����(k��^^c�^Z���jzkN��’J�Z�Z��b�B��K^yy{�JK�?hZ�c[�B_B�� �x��b�j�^�cĄkJJK8{C)�bC�8�(k��^^c�^Z����cBzkN��’J�Z�Z��b�B��K^yy{�JK�?hZ�c[�B_B���;x��b�j�^�cĄkJJK8{C)�bC�8�(k��^^c�^Z����czkN��’J�Z�Z��b�B��K^yy{�JK�?hZ�c[�B_B���;x��b���{y�1%��=(J�,��C�8�(k��%��g�-!!��(��(%1 !5!%1&� ��))))�)%�!!%� �)
Welcome to Home Assistant
homeassistant login: root
Last login: Sun Oct 29 22:02:33 on ttyAMA2
Welcome to Home Assistant OS.
Use ha to access the Home Assistant CLI.
ha supervisor logs
Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?
ha network info
Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?
Why is HA running in docker on this hardware?!
That’s how HAOS works - without docker containers, add-ons like AdGuard wouldn’t be secure. You shouldn’t need to read the dev docs to get a Yellow working, but they exist: Home Assistant Operating System | Home Assistant Developer Docs
Getting a serial console (via the in-built USB serial chip) is something - it indeed proves the CM4 is at least able to boot something, but I’ve found the console to be less useful that you’d think as you’re not root on a monolithic machine, just logged into one VM of several with a non-trivial IPv4 / IPv6 software router between your VM jail and the Ethernet interface you’d like to fix (lots of 172.30.x.x IPv4 which are internal only).
Something looks to have gone wrong with the imaging or first boot of the Yellow’s CM4 eMMC. I’d personally go for a reinstall of the whole default image (or even a RMA), and save the voyage into the internals until after HASS is working: https://yellow.home-assistant.io/guides/reinstall-os/
If you want to really explore and test the hardware, hacks like imaging the CM4 with a generic RPiOS image via the RPi Imager would give you bare metal access, but again, this really should be a plug-and-play experience and not a *nix dev course!
BTW, installing a M.2 SSD in HAOS keeps the boot and root on the CM4 eMMC unless you have a type without storage. Only the user data partitions are moved to the SSD (reasoning is the OS doesn’t change much, compared with the stats database). The Yellow is really a CM4 with peripherals, so the RPi docs on boot order and device selection in E2ROM should still apply.
I sympathize with you for the troubles you are having with the Yellow kit/box. I wish that I could help. However I don’t think that the general message should be that Yellow is a problem. My transition from HA on a Rpi3 to the Yellow Box was easy and a matter of minutes.
At this point, now that you have tried various suggestions, I would go back to your RPi4 while you return the Yellow kit requesting a replacement.
Thanks so much for your detailed suggestions. I first tried the reset by holding the red button, which did not work. However, your idea to reinstall using a USB flash drive has worked and it is now up and running!